CHENNAI: As the standard question of ‘what you want to be when you grow up’ made the rounds, most children I knew speedily scrawled one response: an astronaut. Their ardent reasons ranged from the urge to encounter the cheese-like surface of the moon, zoom through galaxies on a fiery rocket, and discover alien species. This shared curiosity, through centuries, is rooted in how atoms and matter transformed into people, plants, animals, the earth, stars, and galaxies over 13 billion years ago.
From ancient Greek, Chinese, and Indian ideas of chaos to modern-day visions of particles, scriptures and philosophers across ages have attempted to grasp exact answers to how the universe was created. These stray musings spill into literature, science, films, and philosophy.
In the 1790s, Austrian composer Joseph Haydn crafted his masterpiece, ‘The Creation’, inspired by ideas of The Big Bang, Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Book of Genesis, and an array of questions.
Years later, city-based The Madras Guild of Performing Arts (MGPA) is set to present India’s first full premier of Haydn’s work. The composition depicts the wonders of nature and how the world was created.
“Haydn painted a picture using voices and instruments to bring the chaos, The Big Bang, and technical elements that you’d find scientifically and in any scripture reading across religions. Painting a picture through music and listening to it through song, that’s the beauty of creation,” explains Atul Jacob Issac, director of music at MGPA.
While previous premieres across India have chosen to render excerpts of this piece, MGPA has ambitiously attempted to present it in full. The Oratorio will be performed by a 42-member orchestra from The Gustav Mahler Society of Colombo and three soloists from Britain. This two-hour performance is set to transport audiences to the dawn of time, a world of chaos.
Beginning with the C minor chord, which also features in Beethoven’s famous Fifth Symphony, the orchestra will echo the feelings of creation. The director says the funds from the show will be raised and awarded to CANSTOP.
